Technological or market driven innovation?

(----- footnote thinking - just need to comment on this -----)

What drives innovation?
What is the best way to innovate? Talking to development engineers they would say through researching technological opportunities...talking to business people they would argue we need to understand the market first.

But is there a best way to go? I would argue NO....it's true that most great inventions come from technological development but again it is seldom that the actual companies developing the technologies in the first place are actually profiting from them. Coca Cola is a good example...it's in fact more likely that the first movers are the losers in technological driven innovation. Looking at market driven innovation we have all seen many examples of GREAT business concepts, with great prospects...it just lags one thing...the offering (especially when bringing in consultants that don't know anything about your core products). It's easy to write a good business plan for the time machine.....!

Innovation projects should respect their origin
I've seen technological projects being devastated because it was hip to develop business concepts and market knowledge before testing the technology and finding out what it was capable of and to guess on the cusomter segments. I've also seen lots of business concepts being trashed because we didn't have the solution to the concept right now.....

Ideas come from both worlds and we need to respect where we first saw the competitive advantage. A technological driven innovation project builds on an idea that this technology is able to deliver substantial new value.....OK then prove it and then go and learn from the market. Direct all the resources upon proving that the proposed value creation is possible....fine business models and concepts are worth nothing without this. Same goes for market driven innovation. It builds on an idea of superior value creation that we think we can capture somewhere....prove it and the write the business plan and Then initiate operational business development.

There are simply too many examples in daily press of companies blasting out the "breaking news" of a new technology and when you actually dig into it you find a technology that is not tested yet and the article builds mostly on dreams of engineers to what this technology might be able to in the future...

Be MEAN to you value proposition and build your mission
I'm not saying that positive marketing is bad, - I'm saying that if positive marketing should have a longlasting effect, and if companies should increase innovation succes rate they have to keep integrity inside and outside the organisation and be MEAN to the value proposition of the project. As time goes by a project learns and by constantly asking the question "what value are we delivering" it will learn about itself and build its own mission!

Too many projects are driven on the basis of "hope-to-find-something-in-this-exciting-project" with no clue of systematic evaluation of business potential and strategic importance.